Rhys

As he unveiled Tesla’s new humanoid robot, Optimus, this September, Elon Musk spoke with characteristic flamboyance about the device’s potential. “This means a future of abundance,” he declared. “A future where there is no poverty … It really is a fundamental transformation of civilisation as we know it.” Perhaps deliberately, he was echoing the tone of his company’s namesake, Nikola Tesla, who in the 1890s was making similarly bold claims about his own work-in-progress. With his new system of wireless telegraphy, Tesla…

One afternoon a few years ago, Cate Le Bon opened an email that made her shake. Before she knew what was happening, she was crying. “It isn’t like me to have that kind of reaction to something,” she says. Its message was simple: “John Cale is looking for you.”Le Bon was raised 30 miles or so from Cale’s home village of Garnant in Carmarthenshire, but the invitation to play with his band at the Barbican in London during the spring of 2018 reached her at a furniture-making school in the Lake District, where she was studying…

A step-by-step guide to regularly running Jupyter Notebooks using AWS servicesPhoto by Towfiqu barbhuiya on UnsplashYour manager asks, “Can you rerun this analysis for me next week?”. No worries: you set a reminder to rerun it manually.The following week comes, and you rerun the analysis. This time your manager says, “This is great. Can you send it to me weekly?” That’s annoying. You don’t like the idea of opening your Jupyter Notebook, running it, and saving the results to S3 weekly. It’s time-consuming, and you’ve got…

How to forecast with scikit-learn and XGBoost models with sktimePhoto by Markus Winkler on UnsplashStop using scikit-learn for forecasting. Just because you can use your existing regression pipeline doesn’t mean you should. Alternatively, aren’t you bored of forecasting using the same old techniques, such as exponential smoothing and ARIMA? Wouldn’t it be more fun to use a more advanced algorithm such as a gradient boosted tree?Using sktime, you can do this (and more). Sktime is a library that lets you safely use any…

Image: Sony Pictures/MarvelIt isn’t just Transformers that’s celebrating a milestone this holiday weekend. Back in 2012, Sony returned to Marvel Comics’ most popular hero with The Amazing Spider-Man, a reboot completely separate from the original Sam Raimi trilogy, for better and for worse. And ten years later, the two-film franchise (well, two-and-a-half, technically) has managed to find its own place in the increasingly crowded superhero space, just likely not the one it intended.The original Amazing certainly had the…

In 1907, Ella Gwendoline (“Gwen”) Rees Williams sailed to England from Dominica, the Caribbean island of her birth, to attend school in Cambridge. Gwen, who was 16, had long dreamed of the motherland, but from the moment she landed at Southampton, her mood began to darken. If London, her first stop, was sooty and drab and populated by permanently indignant landladies, school was little better. She was mocked for her lilting accent by her classmates, who took particular pleasure in the fact that the maniac who is Mrs…

Most people know Jean Rhys as the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, a title often featured on school and university reading lists. But that prequel to Jane Eyre was actually the Dominica-born author’s last book, and there are riches in store for those who haven’t yet explored the rest of her work. Her biographer Miranda Seymour suggests some good places to start.The entry point“‘Smile please,’ the man said. ‘Not quite so serious.’” It is this opening line that gives the autobiography Smile Please its title, as a young Rhys…